PIA07525: Aligned Moons

Cassini looks toward Saturn’s night side in this view, capturing a glimpse
of Dione’s tortured surface in the foreground and a far-off view of
Epimetheus beyond Saturn. The spacecraft was just a tenth of a degree
above the ringplane when this image was taken.

Parts of Dione’s surface have been stretched and ripped apart by tectonic
forces. Some of these faults are visible here, as is a large impact basin
(not seen in NASA Voyager spacecraft images) near the moon’s south pole.
Although this crater’s diameter has not yet been measured by imaging
scientists, it appears to be wider than 250 kilometers (155 miles), which
would make it the largest impact structure yet identified on this moon.
Dione is 1,118 kilometers (695 miles) across.

Epimetheus (116 kilometers, or 72 miles across) presents a similar face
here to that revealed in a spectacular false-color view from March, 2005
(see PIA06226).

The image was taken in visible light with the Cassini spacecraft
narrow-angle camera on May 5, 2005, at a distance of approximately
910,000 kilometers (570,000 miles) from Dione, 1.28 million kilometers
(800,000 miles) from Epimetheus and 1.42 million kilometers (880,000
miles) from Saturn. The image scale is 5 kilometers (3 miles) per pixel
on Dione and 9 kilometers (6 miles) per pixel on Epimetheus.

The Cassini-Huygens mission is a cooperative project of NASA, the European
Space Agency and the Italian Space Agency. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory,
a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, manages
the mission for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, Washington, D.C. The
Cassini orbiter and its two onboard cameras were designed, developed and
assembled at JPL. The imaging team is based at the Space Science
Institute, Boulder, Colo.

For more information about the Cassini-Huygens mission visit saturn.jpl.nasa.gov.
For additional images visit the Cassini imaging team homepage ciclops.org.